The portrait with the best claim to be 'the one original' of William Shakespeare features pool-dark eyes, a thoroughly recessed hairline, pursed lips and, more controversially, an earring. 1 The simple gold hoop of the Chandos portrait: eye-catching enough, but a modest trinket compared to the more elaborate confections evidently worn by aristocrats such as William Herbert, 3 rd Earl of Pembroke, or even another mere actor, a man assumed to be Nathan Field. 2 Tarnya Cooper, curator of Renaissance pictures at the National Portrait Gallery, discerns a pattern. While wealthy men of the Renaissance were just as likely to wear jewellery as women, and of all types (Cooper lists 'gold chains, rings, hat badges and jeweled buttons, garters and sword belts'), earrings were favoured by people she categorises as 'courtiers and men of creative ambition', including Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Ralegh. Pembroke, she notes, was a keen literary patron. What lay behind the fashion? Cooper is reluctant to say: '[i]t is hard to assess what connotations single earrings may have had in the early seventeenth century'. She does add, somewhat neutrally and perhaps as a concession to body-piercers and tattooists of all periods, that it suggests 'someone who took pride in his individuality'. 3 On the same subject Philip Stubbes, a Puritan writer of the late Sixteenth Century made angry by almost everything that might be classified as civilized life, minced his words archly to suggest that he knew perfectly well what it meant for a man to wear an earring. In his 1583 book, The Anatomy of Abuses,